A Year in Reading: Jean Hanff Korelitz

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According to the elves at Goodreads, I’ve read 70 books so far this year, a feat made possible by the fact that I finally figured out how to get New York Public Library audiobooks onto my iPhone. Many were…just fine. Others had me pushing the fast forward button like a post-operative patient with a morphine drip. A few, like Helene Wecker’sThe Golem and the Jinni, were serendipitous discoveries. I was underwhelmed by one series of novels that writer friends have been urging me to read for years, but I was also forced to rethink my Hands-Off-Classic-Literature! position by Jo Baker’sLongbourn, which was just wonderful. (Also by the recently televised Death Comes to Pemberley, but I don’t suppose that counts…). Hilary Mantel’sWolf Hall lived up to its ecstatic reputation (though I’m not sure I’d have been able to follow the action if I hadn’t recently watched The Tudors on television…). I decided to read Ron Chernow’s Alexander Hamilton biography in anticipation of The Public Theater’s coming tour de force, Lin-Manuel Miranda’sHamilton (which I was lucky enough to see in workshop), so when I go back to see it another 10 times I’ll know more about the man’s life and times. My all-around picks for the year? Lawrence Wright’s Going Clear: Scientology, Hollywood and the Prison of Belief, a scrupulously researched dissection of the cult. (Yes, cult. What, you thought I was going to call it a “religion”?) And John Searles’sHelp for the Haunted, a beautiful novel about the natural — rather than the supernatural — kind of haunting. Finally: praise for Elizabeth Alexander’s memoir, The Light of the World, a meditation on grief and life, which will be published in April 2015.

Rex Sorgatz is a writer, designer, producer, and entrepreneur based in New York City. He currently works for Saturday Night Live and is a contributor at Wired magazine. His writing has appeared in New York, Gawker, Radar, and Spin. Former careers include being Executive Producer of msnbc.com and butchering fish in Alaska. He blogs the internet in real time at Fimoculous.com.I lack conviction.I planned to use this space to step up to the plate. I wanted to go to bat for something published in 2008. But I feared how you would perceive my choice: a sarcastic plea for a post-literate society? a cynical prognostication for the death of the book? a blatant mockery of the written word? a sneering wink to the puerile blogosphere for overthrowing the printed page?Yep, my favorite book published in 2008 was Hot Chicks With Douchebags.Wait!I reserve the right to define "favorite" for a specialized sort of pleasure: this was the book that I kept picking up and paging through, the one I wanted other people to experience, the one that made me wish had a book club because it's so goddamn mysterious and I needed other people to help guide me through its mystery.You think I'm kidding.But I dare you to page through this weird little picture book spun off from a blog - bustling with Hellenic characters, breathless photographic drama, complex anthropological signage, post-porn frisson, and a glossary! - and not feel entranced (or at least pleasantly beguiled). It's a crazy mix of post-op feminism and hall-of-mirrors desire. Lacan would have eaten this shit up.Nonetheless, despite the ponderous appeal of lechery on display, and my spineless inability to support low culture when it most needs it, declaring the douchebag tome as my favorite read this year would be a lie. Instead, a book released in 2002 about a television show that started in 1975 towered over all else for me this year.But it requires a story....Through an arcane sequence of unexpected events, I started working for Saturday Night Live at the end of 2008.It made no sense to me either. But there I was, not as a writer, and definitely not as a performer, but as an internet dork trying to push SNL further into the digital age. Holding meetings in the writers' room on the notorious 17th floor of 30 Rock, I could only think one thing:I have no fucking business being here.Every day I'd walk through the corridor where pictures of 34 seasons of cast members hung from walls. To say I was intimidated is like saying Belushi dabbled.Like you, and maybe like your mom, I grew up on Saturday Night Live, through good years and bad years. And also probably like you, a newfound appreciation of the show arrived this year, as critics seemed to treat its satiric value as the second-coming of A Modest Proposal.Though an avid fan, I was not a historical one - yet at work I was trapped in a sea of historical experts. When a name was dropped that I didn't recognize, I would sheepishly ask who it was referring to. An answer like "He wrote Coneheads" would magnify my ignorance.I clearly needed to study.My girlfriend, who is one of those people who knows the show's history like others know the Torah, recommended Live From New York, an oral history collected by Tom Shales and Jim Miller. Of course I soon discovered it was not only the definitive book about the show, but also one of the most revered popular culture books of all time.Did you know there was an adult version of "The Muppets" in the show's first season? Did you know that Howard Cosell had a show called Saturday Night Live at the same time? Did you know the show started because Johnny Carson wanted to stop running re-runs of The Tonight Show on Saturday nights? Did you know that Bill Murray and Chevy Chase got into a fistfight right before Chevy went on for his monologue in the second season? Did you know that innocuous phrases like "that sucks" couldn't get past the sensors in the early years? Did you know about the drugs? (Okay, you probably knew about the drugs.)This isn't so much a history of a show as it is a history of an era. Having come of age around media startups, I love stories about how things begin. And this oral history is essentially the rattling, sputtering, clanking noises made when trying to start something new.More from A Year in Reading 2008

Zachary Lazar is the author of Sway.I have mixed feelings about the best new book I read this year, Denis Johnson'sTree of Smoke, which just won the National Book Award. The novel reminded me at different times of Apocalypse Now, Dr. Strangelove, Ecclesiastes, and Waugh'sA Handful of Dust. Four hundred pages in, I still wasn't sure what Johnson's intentions were, whether the book was important or just exhaustive, though the dialogue is the best I've read in some time and Johnson's expressionistic blend of horror and beauty makes for dozens of memorable descriptions, blackly funny and cosmic (even when he's describing bowling). Its sinister intensity links it in my mind to my current obsession with the novels Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted by Joan Didion, who was also honored - again - with a National Book Award this year. Didion does more in two hundred pages than most writers manage in three times that many. Even more pithy, and more apocalyptic, is my other current obsession, the poet Frederick Seidel, whose newest book, last year's Ooga-Booga, makes "The Waste Land" seem like the sweetly optimistic work of a kindlier era. I read it whenever I'm feeling depressed about anything, and the sheer evil candor of it works for me like Prozac is supposed to.More from A Year in Reading 2007

My good friend Garth, writer, rocker, and erstwhile purveyor of Hot Face wrote in with his favorite read of the year.The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst -- Callow young aesthete Nick Guest is a devotee of late-period Henry James, whose style, he says, "conceals things and reveals things." In Alan Hollinghurst's portrait of politics, money, and sex in Thatcher-era London, style reveals more than it conceals. Among the revelations this preposterously well-written novel offers, in the end: that there's a little Nick Guest in all of us, that aestheticism is not just a superficial flight from the deeper world but a kind of fumbling toward it, and that Hollinghurst is a novelist of rare gifts. Here he almost single-handedly bridges the divide between the novel of society and the novel of the self, combining the former's imaginative sprawl, objectivity, moral exactitude, and attentiveness with the latter's searing emotional investment in its subject. The Line Of Beauty is by turns charming, voyeuristic, sentimental, merciless, witty, affecting, austere, and graphic. Throughout, it is a triumph on par with Brideshead Revisited, Remembrance of Things Past, or the works of the Master himself.

These books are about pretty bleak landscapes, yet sentence by sentence, both writers manage to make them feel full and warm and bright. McLeod’s prose is breathless and buoyant, Solomon’s sharp and sleek. Both make me want to sit down at the keyboard and make sentences of my own.